India’s Lumia 920 Is A Veritable LTE Machine With Coverage On Nine Bands

We’re well used to seeing the same phone released in different markets with changes to its radio’s frequency coverage; heck, it’s practically par for the course. Sometimes, each individual model has its band support fine-tuned to only work on a subset of all available bands; other times, often with the “global” version of a phone, we’ll see them all (or at least most of them) brought together for one handset. The latter is what we’re thinking about today, upon learning of the incredible range of frequency coverage provided by the version of Nokia’s Lumia 920 for India.

If anyone was to try to define a “universal” smartphone radio, CDMA notwithstanding, this sounds like what it would look like. Besides your normal quad-band GSM, and some very useful penta-band WCDMA for HSPA+, the Indian Lumia 920 supports 4G LTE on a whopping nine frequency bands.

This is no misprint, either; Nokia India confirmed the accuracy of the phone’s frequency support over Twitter.

We know, few users will actually need the phone to support more than a handful of those bands, but we’re still just a bit in awe of how overwhelmingly complete this list seems. Why can’t all phones be like this?

Update: Well, crap. Despite that earlier confirmation, Nokia has gone and removed those LTE bands from the phone’s specs page.

Stephen has been writing about electronics since 2008, which only serves to frustrate him that he waited so long to combine his love of gadgets and his degree in writing. In his spare time, he collects console and arcade game hardware, is a motorcycle enthusiast, and enjoys trapping blue crabs. Stephen's first mobile device was a 624 MHz Dell Axim X30, which he's convinced is still a viable platform. Stephen longs for a market where phones are sold independently of service, and bandwidth is cheap and plentiful; he's not holding his breath. In the meantime, he devours smartphone news and tries to sort out the juicy bitsRead more about Stephen Schenck!